Speak The Language, a group you wouldn’t have heard of unless you watch a TV show called Star Search with Ed McMahon (that is, Ed wouldn’t necessarily be there with you, reclining in the missus’s La-Z Boy and occasionally reaching over to help his hungry self to a fistful of your nachos, but is rather the show’s host), didn’t listen to this column, and behold what it gets them now—being made laughingstocks in front of a national reading audience before a record company can even sign them!

They brought it on themselves. They could have read the recent Eleganza that had to do with what a dreadful idea it is for an unknown group to dress and behave exactly as groups it’s like do. But no.

Speak The Language had to go out and buy long coats exactly like the ones Steve Stevens wears in Billy Idol’s “Rebel Yell” video and the non-Wilsons wear in Heart’s “Never,” had to do their hair and make-up just what Nick Rhodes of Duran Duran does with his, had, that is, to put a Whole Look together that may well make girls watching them on one of the Big Screens at their local mall’s Video Concepts lick their lips and murmur, “Oh, wow,” but which made your columnist, who came in halfway through a recent appearance, guffaw at the sight of them and imagine that what the missus had on wasn’t Star Search at all, but a new rock game show called, oh, Spot That Cliche! Which, if you want my opinion, is a better name than Speak The Language. (I’m not sure that I don’t also prefer The Sentence Without End.)

Speaking of Heart, their “Never” video reminds us of Bob Dylan’s stingingly apt remarks about most modern rock in the booklet that accompanies his Biograph collection. “Nothing means anything. [It’s] just people showing off, dancing to a pack of lies.” It’s bad enough to make music (or art or film or literature) that aspires to nothing more than to turn a profit, as Heart seems to. But when you proceed to sell it by devoting 60 percent of the video to Nancy Wilson’s pout and cleavage and very foolish-looking, utterly unconvincing guitar miming, then you really start flirting with a visit in the dead of night from the Pop Art Morality Squad.

And speaking of things that have caused Eleganza distress since the Change of Ownership, a Warner Records big cheese recently told an interviewer from a rival magazine about how, on encountering A-Ha, he felt giddy at the prospect of having discovered Warner’s own version of Wham! and Duran Duran. That troubles Eleganza as much as the whole censorship-of-lyrics controversy did, as I’m sure it must everyone old enough to have lived through the dismal frankiebobby era between Elvis and the Beatles. Not that terribly long ago, Warner prided itself on being the label of the hippest artists in rock, on being the label that stood by such eccentrics as Captain Beefheart and Randy Newman through thin and thick. To hear one of their biggest cheeses gloating so unashamedly about adding some of pop’s prettiest boys to its artist roster, well, it made Eleganza a little fucking queasy.

Judging from its advertisements, lots and lots of CREEM’s readers play in groups of their own. You might be one of them. You’d be a better judge of that than I. If you are, and the group you play in isn’t a jazz group (as Branford Marsalis notes in Bring On the Night, “I play jazz—I’m used to playing something that nobody wants to hear”), you probably lust after stardom of at least Duran Duranish proportions, for the unqualified adoration of millions.

I used to myself. No, this column is known for its forthrightness. Old as the hills though I may have become (against my better judgment), I still do yearn for what Tom Wolfe so aptly called The Pope’s Balcony of superstardom. I know how it feels.

Spare yourself limitless torment by keeping in mind that, as in the rest of the world outside of professional sports and the circus, the correlation between talent and success in rock ’n’ roll is low enough to suggest a huge blind luck factor.

I’m not saying that stardom doesn’t seem inexorable for a healthy percentage “of the former unknowns who make it big every year—it certainly must have for Johnny Rotten Lydon, say, and for Eddie Van Halen, to name just a couple. Noted English producer Chris Thomas has told me that George Martin told him that the Beatles once had that same undeniable quality about them. What I am saying is that such extraordinarily accomplished or charismatic persons probably account for no more than 60 percent of each

TURN TO PAGE 57 year’s crop of new superstars.

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Consider the evidence. Consider the countless cases of very minor talents who’ve enjoyed very major success. Consider, for instance, that on any Friday or Saturday night, on any stretch of American road where teenagers cruise, three of five cars contain girls who are singing along with the radio or cassette deck better than Stevie Nicks has ever sung in a multi-million-dollar recording studio or in front of a basketball stadium full of adoring fans who’ve brought stuffed animals to toss at her platform booted tootsies.

Is there any more vivid proof of the randomness of superstardom than that of Motley Crue, who are execrable by every known criterion, and by most of the unknown ones as weH? Why, by the same token, should Ozzy Osbourne be rich and famous while thousands of would-be heavy metal heartthrobs who aren’t fat, uncoordinated, and terrible singers have to work in record shops or burger joints or teach calculus at community colleges to afford their distinctive haircuts?

Superstars who became superstars through sheer force of will are forever coming on TV and assuring you that you can do it too if you want to badly enough. But t’ain’t necessarily so. There are countless hundreds who wanted it with all their might, but who didn’t make it in the end. You’ll never see them on TV, though, as they’re apt to depress you, and thus make you a less voracious consumer of the products the medium’s in business to advertise.

Reading this, a lot of you would-be rock stars will fart defiantly and snarl, “Oh, yeah? Well, banana oil to that, John. Nothing can stop me—nuttin’!” All I can say is that, when

you’re 29 or 31 or 33 and you’ve begun to suffer the symptoms of irritable bowel syndrome from all the rage you’ve had to suppress after years of watching people who haven’t the musical pizzazz and sexual charisma in their whole beings that you have under the nails of your left ring toe make more money in a month than you’ll make in a decade, don’t come whining to America’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll Column That Matters.